Character from Hyperion by Dan Simmons
The Scholar — a Jewish professor carrying his reverse-aging daughter to the Time Tombs, hoping the Shrike will cure her before she ages backward past birth and ceases to exist.
Sol Weintraub's tale is the Scholar's Tale — and it is the most devastating story in the book. His daughter Rachel, an archaeologist studying the Time Tombs, was struck by a temporal anomaly that caused her to age backward. She loses one day of memory with each passing day. She forgets her education, her adolescence, her childhood. Sol and his wife Sarai watch their adult daughter become a teenager, a child, a toddler, an infant. Sol carries baby Rachel to the Time Tombs because a voice in his dreams — Abraham's voice, God's voice, something's voice — told him to bring her. The parallel to the Binding of Isaac is deliberate and agonizing. Sol, the Wandering Jew, must decide whether to sacrifice his daughter to a creature of blades on the faith that something will intervene. He hands Rachel to the Shrike. The Shrike takes her. She becomes Moneta — sent backward through time, grown into the woman Kassad loved, living in reverse as the Time Tombs travel backward. Sol's sacrifice was not a death. It was a temporal loop. The relief does not diminish the horror of the choosing. Sol's question — 'How do you raise a child knowing she will forget you tomorrow?' — is the novel's emotional center.
Elderly, bearded, with the soft physique of an academic and the haunted eyes of a father watching his daughter die in reverse. Carries baby Rachel in his arms — the infant she has become after years of reverse aging. His clothing is practical travel wear worn thin by grief.
Also known as: Sol, The Wandering Jew, The Scholar